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Yup. I think people forget that things aren't the way they used to be because we made forward progress. Maybe that means things got more complex. It also means

Yup. I think people forget that things aren't the way they used to be because we made forward progress. Maybe that means things got more complex. It also means more things became possible and it became possible to not have things happen which you wish didn't. If everything worked so fine and dandy in the good old days, we'd still be there.

mettamage 7y ago
> If everything worked so fine and dandy in the good old days, we'd still be there. I'm not a historian, but I'm pretty sure a historian could find a lot of counter examples to statements like this. That includes historians who know an aweful lot about programming languages.
- Enginerrrd 7y ago
  Oh yeah. Take consumer goods got example: A straight razor or double edge safety razor and a bar of soap work an awful lot better, cost the customer significantly less, and produce far less waste than modern mass-produced shaving convenience goods at the expense of greater initial costs and a modest increase in required skillset. A fountain pen with a hand-tuned gold nib is refillable and can last nearly a lifetime with proper use. It also requires good writing technique which will reduce fatigue and enhance legibility. I've yet to find a modern can opener that is remotely usable with any kind of longevity. Instead I keep a couple of swiss army knives in my drawer that always just work, and are faster and are easier to clean than any modern can opener I've tried. Hand-made leather boots can be resoled several times and last a decade or more. All of these things have the same common themes: They were hard to mass-manufacture or sell in quantities as large as mass-manufactured goods, they require a bit more upfront costs to use, and require a modest skill investment by the consumer so there's a barrier to entry. That last bit though is the sinister one though. Moving to more forgiving implements is better right? Not if it means you never learn proper technique for doing things. Dig through a manual on penmanship from the late 1800's and you'll find a wealth of valuable knowledge that can help you write neater and with almost no fatigue even with a modern ball-point pen. Curiously, we don't get lessons even close to that in school today. How's this relevant? Take these attitudes and apply them to software development. If you make your tools more forgiving, you can get away with less training for your developers, right?! Less upfront investment in hiring competent developers! Emphasize scale and throughput over quality! ...and all of a sudden, you NEED a bunch of tools to make up for the increase in project complexity of band-aids slapped on top of poor design. And hey, if you slow development to a crawl, you dramatically reduce the frequency of major errors/downtime! Win-win! /s
  - KirinDave 7y ago
    While its true that disposable consumer goods are a problem, I feel like you're attempting a dogpile via rhetoric rather than really engaging with the spirit of the grandparent's post. Folks weren't even remotely concerned with industrial or consumer waste "in those days" historically, and actually produced quite a bit. What's more, many of these products you're describing used dangerous chemicals or materials that caused many problems. And if we're really harping on writing utensils, all but the cheapest mechanical pencils easily outlast and outperform the lousy (and pointlessly expensive and historically mildly toxic) historically yellow pencils. And for consumer electronics, its interesting to note that the non-replacement policy happens because the components are often so minimal and optimized. It's not clear that we should apply the lessons of physical deployment to software, as the art and science of software is still developing from infancy at such an amazing pace. Modern software (even the bad stuff that us trendy to hate) tends to be remarkably better, prettier and often even faster (albeit at the cost of volatile memory) than even relatively well-thought-out older software from average developers. Give the future a little credit, would ya?
  - zbentley 7y ago
    I think that fails Occam's razor. What if the reason there are more people "doing it wrong" (for various values of "it") is simply because there are more people doing it, period? There are a lot more programmers (and people shaving, opening cans, and writing letters) than there were in the past. As a result, the experience of doing those things changes both because of eternal September syndrome as well as the economies of scale (cheap, low quality crap) that emerged in response to that growth in userbase.
  - projektfu 7y ago
    Try the EZ Duz It can opener. It’s basically the old SwingAway before they sold the name to a maker of cheap openers.
tashoecraft 7y ago
So much agree. The web is very large and there are tons of use cases. So when people start talking about it being so difficult to setup a website because of all these things I just can't understand where there head is at. It's like complaining that they built a rocket destined to go the moon, handled all the requirements to do that, but their use case would have been handled by a weather balloon. Of course they are going to complain about it being overly complex, because it was for their use case. Things aren't helped by companies have dev relations pushing out articles about using their complex stack with simple examples (to get you interested in it for work), or people writing their own blog posts to get familiar with some new/complex stack, and devs reading these thinking they must be using them. Analyze what is being used and why, then decide to use it.
Enginerrrd 7y ago
I can respect this, and acknowledge that there are use cases for all the infrastructure. My question is, are the trade-offs being considered? Not every use case requires all the bells and whistles. It seems possible that development pipelines have moved towards using the bells and whistles in part because developers are familiar with them from FAANG use cases. People choose to use what is in use, often for good reason like there being greater documentation and support for a tool in heavy active use. But that doesn't necessarily mean you're using the right tool for the job. It involves weighing the reduced development costs with possible increases in deployment issues. There are a lot of companies with delusions of grandeur, trying to future proof for massive scaling issues that most likely will never come.
- james_s_tayler 7y ago
  Yeah. I agree. Sometimes the trade-offs are balanced in favor of human factors more than the technical ones and it can skew the results in favor of solutions that aren't exactly a perfect fit, but they're deemed workable because you can find warm bodies willing to work on them .

mettamage 7y ago

> If everything worked so fine and dandy in the good old days, we'd still be there. I'm not a historian, but I'm pretty sure a historian could find a lot of counter examples to statements like this. That includes historians who know an aweful lot about programming languages.

Enginerrrd 7y ago
Oh yeah. Take consumer goods got example: A straight razor or double edge safety razor and a bar of soap work an awful lot better, cost the customer significantly less, and produce far less waste than modern mass-produced shaving convenience goods at the expense of greater initial costs and a modest increase in required skillset. A fountain pen with a hand-tuned gold nib is refillable and can last nearly a lifetime with proper use. It also requires good writing technique which will reduce fatigue and enhance legibility. I've yet to find a modern can opener that is remotely usable with any kind of longevity. Instead I keep a couple of swiss army knives in my drawer that always just work, and are faster and are easier to clean than any modern can opener I've tried. Hand-made leather boots can be resoled several times and last a decade or more. All of these things have the same common themes: They were hard to mass-manufacture or sell in quantities as large as mass-manufactured goods, they require a bit more upfront costs to use, and require a modest skill investment by the consumer so there's a barrier to entry. That last bit though is the sinister one though. Moving to more forgiving implements is better right? Not if it means you never learn proper technique for doing things. Dig through a manual on penmanship from the late 1800's and you'll find a wealth of valuable knowledge that can help you write neater and with almost no fatigue even with a modern ball-point pen. Curiously, we don't get lessons even close to that in school today. How's this relevant? Take these attitudes and apply them to software development. If you make your tools more forgiving, you can get away with less training for your developers, right?! Less upfront investment in hiring competent developers! Emphasize scale and throughput over quality! ...and all of a sudden, you NEED a bunch of tools to make up for the increase in project complexity of band-aids slapped on top of poor design. And hey, if you slow development to a crawl, you dramatically reduce the frequency of major errors/downtime! Win-win! /s
- KirinDave 7y ago
  While its true that disposable consumer goods are a problem, I feel like you're attempting a dogpile via rhetoric rather than really engaging with the spirit of the grandparent's post. Folks weren't even remotely concerned with industrial or consumer waste "in those days" historically, and actually produced quite a bit. What's more, many of these products you're describing used dangerous chemicals or materials that caused many problems. And if we're really harping on writing utensils, all but the cheapest mechanical pencils easily outlast and outperform the lousy (and pointlessly expensive and historically mildly toxic) historically yellow pencils. And for consumer electronics, its interesting to note that the non-replacement policy happens because the components are often so minimal and optimized. It's not clear that we should apply the lessons of physical deployment to software, as the art and science of software is still developing from infancy at such an amazing pace. Modern software (even the bad stuff that us trendy to hate) tends to be remarkably better, prettier and often even faster (albeit at the cost of volatile memory) than even relatively well-thought-out older software from average developers. Give the future a little credit, would ya?
- zbentley 7y ago
  I think that fails Occam's razor. What if the reason there are more people "doing it wrong" (for various values of "it") is simply because there are more people doing it, period? There are a lot more programmers (and people shaving, opening cans, and writing letters) than there were in the past. As a result, the experience of doing those things changes both because of eternal September syndrome as well as the economies of scale (cheap, low quality crap) that emerged in response to that growth in userbase.
- projektfu 7y ago
  Try the EZ Duz It can opener. It’s basically the old SwingAway before they sold the name to a maker of cheap openers.

tashoecraft 7y ago

So much agree. The web is very large and there are tons of use cases. So when people start talking about it being so difficult to setup a website because of all these things I just can't understand where there head is at. It's like complaining that they built a rocket destined to go the moon, handled all the requirements to do that, but their use case would have been handled by a weather balloon. Of course they are going to complain about it being overly complex, because it was for their use case. Things aren't helped by companies have dev relations pushing out articles about using their complex stack with simple examples (to get you interested in it for work), or people writing their own blog posts to get familiar with some new/complex stack, and devs reading these thinking they must be using them. Analyze what is being used and why, then decide to use it.

Enginerrrd 7y ago

I can respect this, and acknowledge that there are use cases for all the infrastructure. My question is, are the trade-offs being considered? Not every use case requires all the bells and whistles. It seems possible that development pipelines have moved towards using the bells and whistles in part because developers are familiar with them from FAANG use cases. People choose to use what is in use, often for good reason like there being greater documentation and support for a tool in heavy active use. But that doesn't necessarily mean you're using the right tool for the job. It involves weighing the reduced development costs with possible increases in deployment issues. There are a lot of companies with delusions of grandeur, trying to future proof for massive scaling issues that most likely will never come.

james_s_tayler 7y ago
Yeah. I agree. Sometimes the trade-offs are balanced in favor of human factors more than the technical ones and it can skew the results in favor of solutions that aren't exactly a perfect fit, but they're deemed workable because you can find warm bodies willing to work on them .